


The Smell of Death Becomes Her

by LilydaleXF



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, MSR, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 14:03:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12842715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilydaleXF/pseuds/LilydaleXF
Summary: It's late at night, and Mulder has a random, impertinent question.Set any time before season 8 and shortly after Mulder and Scully started a physical relationship. Oh come on, you know they did.





	The Smell of Death Becomes Her

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Anjou for the reassurances.

"Does it ever bother you that you smell like death?" Mulder asks Scully as she walks into the room.

"There are so many things wrong with that question, Mulder."

"Okay. But does it?"

Scully sighs. She is well familiar with his brand of random, impertinent questions, but that does not make them any less random or impertinent.

Mulder swivels around in his desk chair to face her as she does not answer him. Instead she continues walking with eyes newly narrowed and askance, drops a folder of papers onto his coffee table, and perches delicately on the worn leather of his couch.

"I thought you wanted to know the results of the autopsy I did tonight," she says. His eyes dart down to the folder before returning to her. His expression doesn't change, and he says nothing. "They're in the folder," she adds with uncharacteristic obviousness but wanting to fill the peculiar mood she feels that he's created.

The left side of his lips quirk slightly upward in half a cheeky grin as he asks, "Then why did you come over if you could've just emailed the file?"

"You don't want me here?"

"You don't want to be here?"

"Mulder…."

"I know, Scully, I know," he says as the other half of his small cheeky grin appears.

His socked feet are on the floor, and he uses them as leverage to slowly rotate the chair and himself back and forth in a short arc. His eyes, however, stay still on her. It's a very pointed look, not unlike in nearly every conversation they've had since she's known him, but it feels different now. Deeper. So she shifts her glance more anonymously to the window behind him.

Odd. This is all so very odd.

She takes note of little sticky dots on the windowpane left over from peeled-off masking tape. She wonders if he has ever cleaned the window moments before concluding that of course he's never cleaned the window. It wasn't too long ago that she commandeered the building's laundry room for hours so every towel and sheet in Apartment 42 could approach a glory probably unseen since they were brought home from the store. Were it not for drop-off dry cleaning, Scully's not sure Mulder could circulate in civilized society.

It's pitch black outside. Blurred spikes of his hair visible out of the corner of her eye are backlit by his desk lamp. They jut into the constellations of tape dots like fading comet dust trails. She's struck with a desire to run her fingers through them, to feel the universe against her skin. She warms and fears her cheeks blush. Her eyes go back to him. It's been only seconds since he spoke.

She returns to the case by announcing, "It's still unclear exactly what caused Mr. Thompson's death. But seemingly all his organs failed since the clean bill of health his doctor gave him earlier this year at his physical."

"All of them?" he questions aghast.

"Seemingly all. Some tests won't be finished until tomorrow. It was the strangest thing, Mulder."

"And that surprises you? Something strange in an autopsy filtered through the X-Files office?"

She rolls her eyes as she tilts her head slightly back and forth and mouths "ha, ha" before saying out loud, "I know I shouldn't find it strange, all things considered given our line of work and the cases that end up in our office, but I can't help it. At least some of the strangeness could have the courtesy of more regularly neatly repeating itself across cases like they taught at Quantico."

"When we get back to the office, Scully, have I got some files in the cabinet to show you if you want strange through-lines."

"I don't need to see all the alleged Sasquatch footprint photos again, thanks." He smirks, she returns it. "I meant medical through-lines." The "and you know it" goes unsaid but clearly understood.

"So where do we go from here?"

"I need to take a look at the rest of the tests, so I suppose we go nowhere until tomorrow."

"A sleepover it is," he declares as he curls himself out of the chair and lumbers to the couch.

His arm stretches behind her as he sits, and she sinks instantly into his side. How did she shake a long day like this before? It's an honest question she asks herself, one without an answer as his body molds to hers. He's long and warm and improbably bony, and his breath is dew where he's kissed her temple. She closes her eyes and slides a hand onto his abdomen over his shirt, feeling his diaphragm hitch as she does. The dew and the hitch are maybe the only things convincing her that this is not a dream.

"I hope you mean a sleepover right here," she says, "because I am never moving from this spot."

"Okay, Scully," he says before kissing her again. He does that now, she's realized, speaking words from his lips and then, if within reach, touching them to her as punctuation. She slides her hand farther along to tighten her arm around him.

They sit for minutes in the quiet of their co-produced calm.

She knows she may be better off without knowing the answer to such an odd question, but her lifelong need to know is something that cannot be shaken. About everything, about him. Especially about him. She lightly squeezes him, opens her eyes, and asks, "Why did you ask me that about smelling like death?"

He answers swiftly as if he was waiting for her to ask, which he probably was. "I was thinking of you, waiting for you before you got here, and I thought remembered the death smell." As she ponders the level of gauche in him mentioning out loud that he was thinking about seeing her soon, he takes an exaggerated inhale. "But no. I can't remember it right without you here."

"In that case you're not remembering, Mulder. You're experiencing."

"Even better."

"Except for how I do not smell like death."

"Yeah, you do. Pretty much all the time."

She lifts up her hand and bops his side.

He chuckles. "It's not a bad thing, Scully."

"I'm not the Grim Reaper incarnate."

"Of course not, but you do carry a scent of guts, chemical preservatives, and steel. Death."

"Sometimes I don't know why I like you."

"Aw, you like me?"

That earns him another bop. "Shut up, Mulder."

He does keep his mouth closed for a short while before he says, "I just didn't know if it bothered you. Your smell of death."

"Should it? I mean, if it exists, which it doesn't." She pauses briefly and more softly asks, "Does it bother you?"

"No, I already said it's not bad. I mean, it's you. Nothing's better." More dew lands on her.

"You don't need to exaggerate."

"I'm not."

Her default is to trust him, but part of that is digging, questioning, confirming. "I can't be a constant bearer and reminder of dying for you, Mulder, not with everything that's--"

"Shhh."

"--happened," she abruptly finishes.

"You're the opposite."

She harrumphs.

"I mean it, Scully. To the answers you uncover, to the people you assure because of them. To the voices you give those who can't tell their stories but for your work and your mind. To me. When I smell that smell – when I even think about that smell – I know that I am with a healer, a fighter, a key to my salvation and, in another way, a key for countless others. I love that smell."

She has absolutely no idea how to respond to that. In fact, she's not entirely sure she heard him correctly. Who is this man making words come out of Mulder's mouth?

She felt his muscles tense, so she knows he's discomforted by her lack of response even before he says, "But I didn't know if you thought of it the same way I did."

"No. I mean, I didn't think of it at all," she manages to say. "Maybe I did in medical school when it was something new, I don't know. But not now."

"I don't mean to make you start."

"Okay," she responds reassuringly.

"I just thought it might bother you, like you said, because of everything that's happened. I didn't want you to feel that way."

"I don't. I won't."

They sit melded in silence. After a time he starts to move, and she can feel his cheek and nose rubbing languidly along the top of her head.

It's sweet, and she knows he's ready to leave the couch, to move to the bed for the night. She smiles. "Stop smelling my death hair, Mulder."

She feels him smile back. "Mmmm, guts."

 _My odd, odd life_ , she thinks as she softly pecks his lips before starting to rise and pulling him up with his hands now and forever in hers.


End file.
